Few would have expected 2011’s reboot film Rise of the Planet of the Apes to spawn one of the best movie franchises of the last decade, but thanks to incredible special effects and a gripping cast of characters, that’s exactly what it did

Few would have expected 2011’s reboot film Rise of the Planet of the Apes to spawn one of the best movie franchises of the last decade, but thanks to incredible special effects and a gripping cast of characters, that’s exactly what it did

Data stolen by the NSA using the Heartbleed bug includes email addresses, passwords and other data that allowed it to carry on cyber espionage operations. The NSA’s silence on the Heartbleed bug’s existence left millions of people vulnerable to attacks in the meantime.

The longer a flaw like Heartbleed existed on the Internet, the more opportunity there was for criminals and enemy states to exploit it to steal information, spy on others and cause incalculable harm to individuals, businesses and government agencies, explained noted security analyst Graham Cluley.

“If it’s true that the NSA knew about the Heartbleed bug, but didn’t tell anyone about it, then they’ve let down everyone who uses the Internet — both around the globe, as well as the law-abiding citizens they are supposed to protect in the United States,” Cluley told Digital Trends.

One of the NSA’s main missions is national security. That includes seeking out software flaws and vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and other governments. The agency’s actions with respect to how it used the Heartbleed bug, and its refusal to inform the public of its existence, seemingly run contrary to those missions, some say.

“It flies in the face of the agency’s comments that defense comes first,” said Jason Healey, director of the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative, and a former Air Force cyber officer. “They are going to be completely shredded by the computer security community for this.”

A handful of programmers runs the OpenSSL security protocol in which the Heartbleed bug lies; the NSA tasks thousands with discovering such vulnerabilities. Once the flaw was uncovered, the NSA essentially put it in its back pocket, instead of warning those who could have patched the problem and kept the nation’s data safe — a part of the agency’s stated mission.

The NSA reportedly has a war chest consisting of thousands of vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, which can be employed to breach computers all over the world. The intelligence community has defended its actions with respect to how it uses other software vulnerabilities, saying that they enhance the nation’s ability to detect threats from terrorists and measure the intentions of hostile, foreign leaders.

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies specializing in cybersecurity, says that the NSA considers multiple options when it discovers vulnerabilities like Heartbleed. They include temporary exploitation combined with collaboration with software developers to plug the flaw.

“They actually have a process when they find this stuff that goes all the way up to the director” of the NSA, Lewis said. “They look at how likely it is that other guys have found it and might be using it, and they look at what’s the risk to the country.”

The Heartbleed bug is a serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL Internet encryption protocol known that has potentially left the information of most Internet users vulnerable to hackers. The Heartbleed bug reportedly affects as much as 66 percent of the world’s active websites, and has existed for roughly two years. That’s according to a team of Codenomicon researchers, as well as Google Security researcher Neel Mehta.

“We’ve never seen any quite like this,” Michael Sutton, vice president of security research at Zscaler, a security firm, says. “Not only is a huge portion of the Internet impacted, but the damage that can be done, and with relative ease, is immense.”

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